Thursday, August 30, 2007

FUSE ESB

What's in FUSE ESB right now? Well, it's roughly a distribution of ServiceMix trunk. This implies that FUSE ESB is released ahead of the Apache ServiceMix distribution (the latest release is 3.1.1, whereas FUSE ESB is based on 3.2).

Why are you using the latest trunk instead of the most stable branch? Well, mostly because our customers needs some of the latest features available. We take great care of what is in our Fuse branch: we do not necessarily backport all new stuff from trunk. We may also add some specific customer needs inside our own distribution, features that are not present in the trunk version.

So is that a fork? Certainly not :-) We have always supported Apache ServiceMix and we will continue to do so. But our customers have specific needs, so we may need to do custom development or have custom branches for them to fullfill these needs. Over time, we put the features that we consider generic enough back to the community. But this level of support can not be provided in a community driven environment such as the Apache Software Foundation. Let alone the fact that our customers often require privacy regarding their issues or their specific needs, environments and projects, so that it becomes difficult to use the open mailing lists of the community.

So is that a closed source version? No. The Apache License would allow that (quite the opposite of the GPL), but this is not what we aim for. Our process is quite open: as an example, I've recently developed an AsyncBridge EIP pattern for FUSE ESB (see the issue) that will certainly be contributed back to the community...

Hopefully, this blog entry will clarify a bit the IONA policy with respect to the Apache projects it supports and the relationship between FUSE ESB and ServiceMix. Feel free to download it and give it a try...

mr Nodet, i install Fuse ESB.if you follow a guide not succeded with succes nothing example. infact the FUSE, in fuse do only copy sa in hotdeploy.. same thing if you use maven..so i find a guide for fuse!!

I'am presently studying the opportunity of using esb on some products.

As I was surfing on servicemix website, I only found updates whose dates were previous November 2007 except in the forum. Moreover I am reading in this blog you "left" servicemix (but hopefully you did not go too far away ;)). So I am a little worried, could you tell me if the community around the product is as active as it was before?